Random Mumblings

Below are a few links I pulled together for a pizza lunch (and I wonder why so many accepted the calendar invite) at the News Sentinel today on "Brand Me" for journalists.

Personal branding and the use of Social Media networks can be a controversial topic for journalists, after all more than one has been fired (euphemistically forced to resign) over something they said on Twitter or Facebook or in a blog.

Also, many journalists are uncomfortable about promoting themselves or their work even in the information overload world we live. The early adopters in our newsroom have had few concerns or issues about getting involved in Social Media buzz, but as more journalists are being encouraged to get involved, concerns or frets have surfaced that often don't have easy answers.

it is clear many journalists, however, are using Social Media, the Internet, and all the digital media at their disposal to draw readers/viewers/audience to themselves, to enhance their credibility and reporting authority, and to find stories, even scoops.

News via social networks and having an identity on social networks is becoming a "must have" within news organizations. Just this week, Facebook published "Facebook + Media" to promote best practices for journalists, developers and media partners.

Where do you weigh in on "Brand Me" for journalists? Are there additional links I should have included below?

YouTube video - 7 Steps To Building Your Online Identity

Using social media for better journalism: @Sreenet at #ONADC « digiphile

Headlines and Deadlines: Some conflicting thoughts on Facebook

Facebook | Facebook + Media

SmartBlog On Social Media » Social media tips for journalists

Sree Sreenivasan - @sreenet, @SREENET'S SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDE - a work in progress

12 Tips for Journalists: My Semester on the Personal Branding Beat at Brand Me a Journalist

View your profile

It is NOT personal branding - it's Just living your life online. « DigiDave

Building your career brand as a journalist | JobsPage

Teaching Online Journalism » Journalists must build a personal brand: 10 tips

As journalists, are we our own brands?  | Medill | Washington

Colonel Tribune: Chicago's Unlikely Social Media Pioneer

Boned! - Age columnist sacked over Twitter comments - Digital Media

Octavia Nasr Resigns from CNN Following Controversial Tweet

Giving a Publitweet a spin. Do you like this widget?

Benton's Bacon has gone totally viral in the last couple of years.

Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams, the Madisonville, Tenn., maker of hams and bacon has become something of a food legend in the Internet age. At a recent checkup, my doctor recommended trying Benton's Bacon (he was not extolling its healthful benefits, but, hey, compared to most cereal ...) and then the bag boy at Butler and Bailey commented on how much he liked as he was bagging it at the checkout counter.

How did the albeit excellent products of the company, started by a dairy farmer in 1947 in rural East Tennessee, because a connoisseur item for serious foodies (and others) in places like New York City? Dunno. Good products and a lot of media sizzle is my best guess.

In the Knoxville News Sentinel's electronic archives (which date back to September 1990), the earliest mention I could find of the company and its now legendary hams and bacon is a 1995 feature by reporter Morgan Simmons.

Today, it's often mentioned when serious foodies turn to talking country hams and bacon.

• Benton's Bacon | Kate Sonders Food Writer:
• benton's bacon...and a water fall : mock technologies:
• Allan Benton Interview - Interview with Owner Benton's Hams - Esquire:
• Benton's Bacon | Atlanta Wine Guy:
• Allan Benton Signs on for Camp Bacon! | Zingerman's Camp Bacon:
• His Ham Stands Alone, Bacon: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com:
• The Church of Allan Benton, Bacon: Chefs + Restaurants : gourmet.com:
• The Curious Cook - American Ham Makers Are Bringing the Flavor Back - NYTimes.com:
• THE GURGLING COD: Benton's Bacon:
• Al Forno: A Visit to Benton's:
• Benton's Smoky Mountain Country Hams:
• DiBruno Bros: The Queso-Files:

Long-time Knoxville radio news broadcaster Dave Foulk has built up 4,229 friends on his Facebook page. Maybe Foulk personally knows over 4,000 people and counts them as friends; I kind of doubt it. They were there for another reason.

They had grown accustomed to his frequent, short police-scanner type posts throughout the day.

Stalled car- Chapman Highway- southbound at Stone Road

Wreck: Maynardville Highway at Brown Gap Road   
 
Delta airliner blew a tire taking off from Atlanta for Portland blew a tire. Circled Alabama, then landed safely back at ATL

Traffic signals not working at Emory at I-75

All that ended Thursday when Foulk posted a Facebook post that said:

That generated 57 comments (at least by early this morning); most of them were sad, many of them thanked him for the service he had provided, several were mad at the radio station he works for.

I'm not privy to all (or any of) the factors the radio station's management or Foulk considered, but discussions about the role of Social Media within news organizations and how it fits into newsgathering is a hot topic. How Social Meida fits into the organization's image and how it figures into the company's bottom line efforts are questions being discussed by news executives and publishers and general managers and station managers nearly everywhere.

If I had the answers, I'd be a Social Media consultant, or failing at that, a mere media mogul. Lacking answers, I do have some observations.

• While Foulk's posts to Facebook weren't generating ad revenue for the station or even page views for its website, he had built an enviable following (over 4,200 friends) that 1) realized he is a radio news guy posting news to Facebook, 2) that accepted him as a "trusted source" and 3) valued his posts as a timely service.
• From my outsider observer's view, his posts weren't detracting from his ability to do news on the radio.
• If you read the comments, he was providing a news service where the audience wanted to read it.

This last point cannot be overlooked as much as news organizations would like people to go our website or channel or newspaper. The audience now wants news to come to them. Or as a college student told a market researcher: "If the news is that important, it will find me."

Ubiquity of the media organization's brand is a smarter strategy than a "play in my sandbox" approach. If you don't have audience as a media company, you have nothing in any media supported by advertising. But where's the money? Hopefully, that ubiquity will draw users to your station or channel or newspaper or website where you do have advertising environments.

Where does the individual's brand begin and the employer's brand begin? Unfortunately there's no bright yellow line because the person is the human face of the faceless company. How that is managed is an evolving exploration for both the people and the companies they work for with various strategies and policies being tried, modiied, abandoned and implemented.

I think Foulk, accidentially or intuitively, had hit upon an extremely powerful way to build the credibility of himself and by extension his station as a source of real time news with his Facebok page. As a competitor, I wish his company well with their new approach. If you liked his Facebook page, you might like this one.



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Knoxville-based newspaper consultant Kevin Slimp's luck with Delta Air Lines continues to be a muddled mess of delays and cancellations.

A column Slimp wrote on a June trip to and from hell and the resulting customer service torture appeared on KnoxvilleBiz.com on Sunday (we also wrote about it earlier).

And so just yesterday on a flight from Knoxville to Bismarck, N.D. his Delta flight began to go horribly wrong in Memphis.

He posted a Facebook update yesterday:

OK. I'm flying on ... you guessed it .. Delta today. Decided not to go through Atlanta. You just can't get from Knoxville to Atlanta. So I took the Memphis route. Mistake. Big Mistake. I hope to see you good folks in Bismarck tomorrow. This might require another rental car before it's over. Stay tuned ...

Later in the evening, he said:

Latest Latest Update: My latest flight has been delayed from Memphis to Minneapolis. Yes, it's been 6 lovely hours here. Unless my flight from Minneapolis to Bismarck leaves late, chances are I will be ... yes, driving 8 hours in a rental car (from Midnight till 8) to be at my gig at 8 a.m. in Bismarck. Anybody got a s...pare tire? If anyone from Delta is reading this, go ahead and start writing the check.

Below is a post after he finally made it to Bismarck, six hours late.

Congrats to the Knight-Batten Innovation Award winners! All 30 ideas look exceptional.

We're seeing what we can do with YouTube Direct. Anybody else using it? Thoughts about it?

Here's a little more about what we are doing in trying to gather videos of and about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We have some other ideas we hope to try as well.

Below is the playlist of videos created by our Smokies project.

"If we don't start treating our audiences as customers, they will stop treating us as a brand they want to consume."

-- Raju Narisetti, the managing editor who oversees The Washington Post website.

Michael Moore is an artistic and intellectual thief.

Yes, Michael Moore, the American filmmaker, author, political commentator and self-professed liberal who enjoys the skewering the ethical transgressions of corporate organizations.

Yes, Michael Moore of the documentary films Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, and Capitalism: A Love Story.

Yes, Michael Moore, an unabashed and unrepentant nose-thumber at copyright protections. Hey, it's just a federal law.

On July 5, while most Americans were enjoying a Fourth of July day off, Knoxville News Sentinel reporter Frank Munger and photographer Michael Patrick were out in the 90-degree heat covering peace protesters at the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

In addition to calling in Web updates and writing a story for knoxnews.com and for next day's print edition, he shot a short video. Patrick shot several photos that were used in a photo gallery.

Despite a prominent copyright notice on every page of the website, Michael Moore's website took the entire article and posted it online.

The video Munger shot was grabbed, the Knoxnews logo was clipped out and a new copy posted to Michael Moore's YouTube channel complete with video credits for Munger at the end.

Early Friday, I filed on the behalf of the Knoxville News Sentinel (my employer) a "take down" notice with YouTube and the pilfered version of the video was removed by YouTube by Saturday afternoon.

I also submitted the contact form on the michaelmoore.com website directed to the website administrator demanding our photos, which had also been snagged from knoxnews.com, be removed.

So far, they haven't.

It's not that we're opposed to sharing our content. We like other sites to link to our content and we also heavily link out to sites other than own.

The video we posted on knoxnews has embed code that allows it to be legally be placed on another site, as does the version of the video we posted to our YouTube channel. It's  just a simple cut-and-paste of a code snippet. But why bother, it's only someone else's work product.

A thumbnail of one photo (the ones posted are larger than thumbnails) and a link to the gallery would have been great. But why bother, it's only someone else's work product.

An excerpt of the article with a link to the complete story would have been excellent. But why bother, it's only someone else's work product.

From a look at some other content on the site, MichaelMoore.com makes a regular habit of reposting copyrighted work in total without adding any type of additional value.

Did Michael Moore personally misappropriate our copyrighted material? I don't know, but he has to take responsibility for the website that bears his name.

And that's the awful truth and Michael Moore.

(Photo: Screenshot of MichaelMoore.com page with News Sentinel story and photos. By the time I grabbed this, the video they had taken from knoxnews.com and uploaded to YouTube had been removed. Click on the photo to see a larger version.)


Update: Welcome Instapundit readers! Click here to return.

Troubling "Shield Law" incident in North Carolina as a legislative committee subpoenas raw, unaired footage from the state-funded UNC-TV public television network about a story involving the environmental record of aluminum giant Alcoa and its efforts to get re-licensed for a federal permit to run a hydro-dam on the Yakin River.

While North Carolina has a "Shield Law" that protects journalists, attorneys for UNC-TV aren't sure it covers work that received tax funding and turned over the video to a state Senate committee.

This might be a wrinkle that hasn't been fully considered by proponents of public funding options to support journalism. A lot of investigative journalism is being done not only by public television, but by public radio stations owned by state univeristies and funded in part by tax dollars.

Andria Krewson raises that and other questions and has a good set of links to the coverage so far.

Surprised RTNDA, SPJ and the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press haven't weighed in vocally on this one (If they have, they're not touting it on their websites).

Tip: Great interactive map of state journalism "Shield Laws" in the United States.